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House 1

It is hard to put experiences from the last 7 days into words. I've been living and working out of a house in Toronto with Lucas, a developer from Germany. We've been calling this place, 'House 1'. It's interesting how a word can take on meaning if you just start saying it often. Names are something I think about a lot more since experimenting with computer programming. They are the building blocks of a concept's architecture.

When I wake up each morning, there's so many open loops and ideas in my mind. I walk out of my room to take a shower and on the way there I see if Lucas is already up. I try not to mention anything about Futureland, but I usually spew out a bunch of random thoughts about what we were working on last night or something that still needs to be done. I try and clear my head when I am in the shower.

It doesn't take me long to sit down and turn on my MacBook Pro. From then on it's hard to keep track of time. Lucas and I synchronize our deep work. I set a timer for 25mins and we don't interrupt each other until the timer beeps. When it beeps, we share our work for no more than 5 minutes then turn on the timer again. Sometimes I'll turn on my MacBook at 8:30am and then the next time I look at the time it's 6pm. There's something about this project that is so fun and addictive to work on. This of course isn't sustainable and I've been making little improvements. Sometimes it can be hard to just turn off your computer and walk away.

In the evenings, people start coming by the house. Artists, filmmakers, architects, entrepreneurs and investors – some of them already use Futureland. Sometimes they sit down and synchronize their deep work with us. I'll tell everyone we are setting a timer for 25mins and then all of us work in an uninterrupted state until the timer beeps. Other times we share our Futureland progress and experiments with them. They give us feedback, imagine new use cases or start setting up their own projects. I often send them an iMessage the next day to let them know their suggestion is now part of Futureland.

There's something very special about bringing people together to work out of a house instead of a studio or a workspace. I don't have the exact words yet. Perhaps since houses are created for multiple purposes and not just work, it results in an environment that is more conducive to play. There can be tables to eat together, a fireplace, a window looking out to a quiet neighbourhood, places to sleep or sit on the floor, books to read, a kitchen to make food together, a backyard to meditate, a place to clean together after some friends were over.

When you go to a house that is consistently inhabited by the same people, it starts to feel like you're going into a home. And often when you are working on something new, there's a lot of things people don't understand about your vision. There is both doubt and support, always more doubt. It's as if the house becomes a home for the vision. People start to think, "Maybe this idea is real. Maybe this can really happen. I mean, it has a home. Everything real has a home."